Acer recently came out with a new 6K 31.5-inch display, the ProDesigner PE320QXT. It's a touchscreen display that's able to work with a Mac using touch drivers, and it's aimed at professional creators. It's fun to use, but there are some compromises, and this is not the display to get unless you really want touch integration.
This is a big, heavy display. It's thicker than my Apple Studio Display, and it's thicker than any other display I've tested, likely because of the touch layer. It does have a tapered design so the sides aren't quite as thick as the middle, but this isn't a modern-looking monitor. It doesn't resemble something designed in 2026, especially with the button-based controls and the thick bezels. If someone told me this was a display from 2006, I'd believe it. With its stand, the ProDesigner weighs about 22 pounds, and it takes up a lot of room on my desk.
The display uses an IPS panel and has a resolution of 6016 x 3384, and it can connect to a Mac using HDMI or USB-C. I tested it on a 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro running macOS Golden Gate and an M4 MacBook Air. By default, macOS uses a 3008 x 1692 scaled resolution, which is a good compromise between display quality and sizing. It can be set at higher resolutions, including the full 6016 x 3384, but window sizing and text get smaller as resolution goes up.
Text is crisp and everything looks sharp at the default resolution, but brightness is limited to 400 nits and contrast is just fair, not outstanding. My office is bright, and in the daytime, 400 nits is a little too dim, especially if I'm simultaneously using the MacBook Pro's much better mini-LED screen or a Studio Display with the Acer ProDesigner. Brightness does go up to 600 nits for HDR content, but I wouldn't recommend it for HDR movies because it doesn't have the local dimming you get from mini-LED or OLED.
Though brightness wasn't where I wanted it to be, quality and color were excellent. With some displays, it's unpleasant to use them with a MacBook Pro because of the pixel density mismatch, but 6K resolution makes a difference when using the display next to a MacBook Pro. Text and interface elements don't look soft or low-resolution. Acer says the display is Calman-verified for color accuracy with support for 99 percent of the Adobe RGB and P3 color gamuts. I don't have a colorimeter or a reference display for testing, but colors were saturated and seemed similar to those on my MacBook Pro. I did notice a little light bleed at the edges of the display when viewing a dark image in a dark room, but it's not something I noticed in regular use and the display otherwise looked uniform.
One of the main concerns with any kind of color work is the glossiness of the display. This is one of the most reflective displays I've used, and it is problematic when viewing dark content in a room with bright light. If you have lights behind you, they're going to reflect and make it harder to see what you're working on. Acer says it's an anti-glare display, but I disagree.
This is a display with a 60Hz refresh rate, and I do notice the lower refresh rate when scrolling through webpages because I'm used to my Mac's 120Hz option. This isn't a display I'd choose for games because of it, but games do look good thanks to the resolution.
Controls
Acer doesn't have a native macOS app for controlling the display, so there's no way to control brightness from the Mac unless you download third-party display software. I use BetterDisplay, and it works well.
Without third-party display software, you're limited to the brightness controls on the monitor itself. There are five buttons on the bottom right of the display. On-device controls are not as convenient as software-based controls, and it takes too many button presses to adjust brightness. I need to press one button to toggle the brightness setting, then use a different button and press several times to adjust up or down.
The brightness control is right next to the power button, so I've accidentally turned the display off several times. It's hard to imagine a control scheme that would be less ergonomic than the one Acer chose. You can tediously control all of the display settings with the physical buttons, or use third-party software to solve the problem.
Stand
The ProDesigner uses a folding stand made for switching between an upright and a tilted, low-angle orientation, with the latter meant to be used for drawing, sketching, and other tablet-style work. Since the stand is meant to tilt into a tablet position, it doesn't have much height adjustment, with about six inches of range. If you need the display to be taller, you'll need a monitor riser.
It is easy to pull it down into more of a tablet mode, and when it's oriented like that, it's like using a giant iPad or drawing tablet. It can be adjusted to several different angles, and it swivels 360 degrees so you can find the best position for whatever you're doing. The stand mechanism feels well-designed and there's little friction when making changes.
I didn't think attempting to draw or write on a display this size was going to be comfortable, but being able to angle the display helped. I had no issue when using it at my desk, though it does take up a lot of space. This isn't a situation where you can pick up your drawing surface and pop over to the couch to draw. You need the right setup for this display and its large stand.
The stand design makes the most sense if you're often using the display in touch mode, and less sense if you just want a display. It doesn't have the range of height adjustment of a standard desktop display because of the mechanism to shift it into a tablet position.
Ports and Charging
The display connects to a Mac over USB-C and offers 90W passthrough charging. That's not enough power to reach the 140W maximum charging speed of a 16-inch MacBook Pro, but it was enough to keep my Mac topped up over the course of the day, even while gaming.
It has two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port, a USB-C port with power delivery, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, a USB-B upstream port, and a 3.5mm jack. There is n... Click here to read rest of article
Article Link: Review: Acer's 6K Touchscreen Display Turns Your Mac Into a Giant iPad, Sort Of
